Beauty and the Beech
“So what do you see?”
I’ve asked my friend Kristin, a documentary photographer, to show me how she sees the world she captures on film. She’s taken me on a walk into a beech grove near the campus of Franklin & Marshall College, and asked me what I see.
“I think that one is a very cool tree,” I say, pointing at the largest one. “I wish we’d come here in the spring when it had new leaves.”
She says nothing, nods, and we move closer. She reaches out to touch the tree I’ve identified, then puts her ear against it. We both take photos with our phones. I see a large, snaking, gnarled tree. Pretty interesting.
The beech. What I saw.
She focuses on a section where the tree bark has been ripped off and is trying to grow back. Then she creates a visual story of injury and rebirth, with layers and textures and shades and rhythm, the music of hope.
What Kristin saw. (Photo by Kristin V. Rehder)
How does she see what I can’t? She tries to explain as she looks at the tree through her phone lens, slowly moving up the tree: “You find something that’s interesting. But then you don’t just get fixated on the thing you saw. You start to go up and down and look over here… and then this way and keep going and going… and you keep going up, all the way to heaven.”
Kristin is an artist. She sees things in ways others don’t, then figures out a way to present them so it’s easier for us to see the beauty in them ourselves.
But we miss out on a lot if we outsource the discovery and definition of beauty to professionals.
All of us can get loud beauty – ostentatious rainbows, cymbal-filled symphonies, or grand jetés — or even gravity-defying dunks.
It’s harder to find the sublime in simplicity.
Kristin and I walk on, until she stops short of an arrangement of leaves on a brick pathway. She says she sees “a haiku.” She takes a photo.
Beauty can be right under our feet. But we usually step on it. (Photo by Kristin V. Rehder)
We move on, and I look back as a couple passes us. I hear the crunch as they stomp on the leaves, eyes focused on a building in the distance.
What Kristin helps me to understand that afternoon is how much I don’t see every day, and how much more is out there.
In my own non-artistic way, I’ve known this before — in glimpses.
· I remember the time my wife and I committed to hang out for a full sunset together from a sofa inside a Madison Square Park apartment. For two hours we watched as the sun snuck closer to buildings and trees, then danced around and between and through and under gaps. It was better than any action film. We should have gotten popcorn.
· There was a moment of wonder as I heard musical overtones for the first time during a rehearsal with an a capella group in college. Two notes, sung by me and my friend Barry, mugged and hugged each other, combining to create something new that I’d never heard.
· There was the awe that came after my friend Mac and I stumbled into an unmarked 14th century chapel near a tiny crossroads called Pancole in rural Tuscany. The chancel was stripped down to almost nothing – no elaborate crucifixes, no gold altars or stained glass, no paint or heat — just a few wood benches. But someone had set up a recording of Gregorian chants that ricocheted off four stone walls. And then a few minutes later, I got to be there as a light came, glinting through clear glass…
The chapel at Panole. (Photo by Rev. Mac Schafer)
You’ll be able to come up with the equivalent glimpses of beauty in your life, if you just give yourself a few minutes. Do it now. I’ll wait…
What these moments — yours and mine — have in common, I think, is that they come when we are open to them – when we have tuned up our senses and turned off our busy-ness. When we are not on our way to somewhere, but smack dab in the middle of where we are.
They don’t come to us on demand, but serendipitously, when we are able to be patient.
And they will come to us more often, I think, if we believe they exist. Kristin has the gift of an eye, trained over time, and she understands the technique needed to present an image in a digital file or on paper. But she also sees more because she is willing to go out into the world with the conviction that there is beauty waiting to be discovered.
What a gift of optimism! Maybe if each of us could have just a little more of that we could begin to more regularly see the trees, and not just the forest.
And maybe we would realize the beauty we can find in the trees in every season.
Weeping Beech in Fog, 2018 (Photograph by Kristin V. Rehder)
-Leslie
Notes:
Kristin’s latest exhibit, TREMOR: Reflections on the Nature of Parkinson’s, looks at the connections between her body’s quaking (she has had Parkinson’s since 2019) and the movement of the world she observes. It is on display at the Phillips Museum at Franklin & Marshall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania through December 8 before moving to Endeavour Hall at St. Catherine’s School in Richmond, Virginia December 15- April 12, 2024. You can learn more about her work here.
Experiencing beauty is not just a good thing because it is joyous for us. Dacher Keltner, director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley has done research showing that seeking out daily doses of “awe” can reduce levels of tissue-damaging cytokines, lower our levels of stress, improve our overall happiness and increase our creativity. One additional bonus: Alexandra Hudson, in her new book The Soul of Civility (see my review here), makes a case for appreciation of beauty as an alternative to politics as a central value in our lives.